Time to get beyond history books

LET ME BEGIN with an admission. I am not averse to school history books being revisited or revised by historians from the RSS school of history.

- Tavleen Singh

For far too long, they were written by dogmatic leftists who chose in the name of secularism to exalt the 'great Moghuls', and diminish Hindu rulers and their often-magnificent achievements. The books they wrote were mostly so boring that people like me, who now read history books with fascination, ended up asleep in history class. In the moments that I was awake, I did notice that there were three periods of history that were taught: ancient India, Moghul and British.

What I learned about pre-Islamic India was so little that it was not until I was an adult that I heard of the mighty south Indian dynasties and discovered the wonders of Hindu civilisation. It was on holidays in Indonesia and Cambodia that I saw the extent to which India's civilisation had influenced language, culture and religion across the east. Angkor Wat and Borobudur left me stunned by their beauty and scale. So, if there is a bit of revisionist history being introduced into school textbooks, I have no problem at all. The Moghuls did tear down temples and impose taxes on us idol-worshippers, and the truth about these things should never have been concealed. Not from Hindu children or Muslim.